He Told Richard Nixon to Confess

Only one minister spoke up.

There were many clergy in and out of the White House in those years, as Richard Nixon scrambled to cover up the fact that his men had broken into the Democratic Party headquarters and bugged the Watergate office phones to try to give him an unfair advantage in the 1972 presidential election. Various ministers preached to Nixon as the conspiracy unraveled and everything he had done—the casual criminality, disregard for morality, dirt, skullduggery, expletives, compounding lies, secret tapes, and obstruction of justice—came into the light.

But they didn’t address it. They didn’t follow the path of the Old Testament prophet Nathan, who went to King David after David tried to cover up his sin. Nathan spoke in a way that convicted the king—“You are the man!”—and gave him a chance to repent (2 Sam. 12:7).

Nixon also met privately with clergy from a whole array of evangelical churches, plus mainline Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. Some were famous. Leaders with authority and prestige, comfortable in the halls of power. Almost to a man, they said nothing.

Except John Huffman.

The evangelical Presbyterian pastor spoke simply and directly about the moral dimensions of the Watergate scandal and spoke with a clarity that Richard Nixon could hear.

Huffman was not well known and still isn’t. Even in the apparently endless writing about evangelicals and politics and all the debates about the proper way to engage in the public square, his name is essentially forgotten.

But I had to know: Why him?

It’s not obvious that Huffman should have had some special dispensation of moral courage. He was the young pastor of a seemingly average church. What gave him the power to resist the flattery and the promise of access that seduced so many?

So I found his phone number. He is still alive and an active church member in California. I called him. Huffman, now 83, was surprised at the questions. He promised to try to answer, but it has been a half century and people don’t ask much about Nixon anymore.

“Now, what is this story that you’re working on?” he said.

For the past several years, I’ve been writing a religious biography of Richard Nixon. He was a Quaker, as many people know, but he wasn’t very devout. He wasn’t pious. In fact, he was amoral, driven by ambition and resentment, his actions moderated only by his shame.

That didn’t serve him well. He ended his presidency in disgrace. To date, Nixon is the only US president forced to resign—making him an odd choice for a religious biography.

But his story is a religious story. Religion was at the root of who Nixon was, the struggle beneath all his successes and failures. Like Jacob in the Bible, Nixon wrestled with God. But he couldn’t accept God’s blessing, wouldn’t accept that the Creator of the universe loved him and he didn’t have to earn that love.

I read a lot about Nixon, writing my book. And a lot by him. I went to the former president’s archives in Yorba Linda, California, and read his memos, notes, and speeches. I looked through his extensive correspondence and read the letters he exchanged with ministers when he was a congressman, senator, vice president, and president.

Nixon’s life and career were actually influenced a lot by ministers. That hasn’t been noted much by previous biographers, who have been more interested—for obvious reasons—in Nixon’s political trajectory than his spiritual journey.

But a Catholic priest named John Cronin, for example, convinced a fresh-faced Congressman Nixon that Communism was the most important issue of the day. Nixon remade himself into a cold warrior and rose to national prominence as a Communist fighter under the guidance of that priest.

When he was vice president, Nixon became friends with evangelist (and CT founder) Billy Graham. Graham helped Nixon shape his public profile. He introduced Nixon to influential religious leaders and coached him on how to talk about his faith while campaigning. At one point, Graham even drafted a political speech that Nixon could give. I found it in the archives.

Nixon’s political career cratered in the 1960s after he lost his first presidential campaign and then, embarrassingly, a race for governor of California. It was another minister who inspired him to pick himself up and run for president again: Norman Vincent Peale, who was famous for his book The Power of Positive Thinking.

AP / Charles W. Harrity

President Richard Nixon with Billy Graham (left) and choir director Allen W. Flock (right) at a church service in the White House.

When the controversy over the cover-up of the Watergate break-in started to consume Nixon’s presidency, though, none of these men were there to counsel him to do the right thing.

Cronin, the Catholic priest, had fallen out of the habit of corresponding with Nixon after Nixon’s election in 1968. There’s no evidence he tried to write Nixon about Watergate.

Peale, who had been Nixon’s pastor, didn’t say anything either. The popular preacher was, in truth, a timid and anxious man. His letters to Nixon show a tendency toward wheedling. He wanted Nixon to like him so much that he would never challenge him.

If any minister were going to say something to Nixon, it probably should have been Graham, the “pastor to presidents.” He told Nixon to go to church, read his Bible, and trust Jesus. He spoke clearly and forcefully about the importance of public morality and moral leaders, and he praised Nixon, specifically, for setting a good example for the nation.

But Graham also had a tendency to get distracted by politics. He might call to tell the president he was praying for him and end up talking about the issue of the day or campaign strategy. Graham’s biographer, historian Grant Wacker, told me that the evangelist had an addiction to politics. Graham knew it could obsess him and pull him away from his calling. He would resist for a while but then fall off the wagon.

Graham also could convince himself that partisan victories were critical to the work of telling the world about Jesus. Once in 1971, on a yacht ride up the Potomac with Nixon, Graham said there “wouldn’t be any hope” for evangelism or evangelicalism unless Nixon won reelection. An electoral victory was “absolutely imperative,” he said, implying that he meant not only for the country but also the kingdom of God.

Graham didn’t know it, but he was using the same we-have-to-win logic that would justify the break-in and bugging of the Watergate a year later.

Getty / Bettman

President elect Nixon and his family with Norman Vincent Peale (right) at Peale’s church in New York.

He didn’t speak clearly about the morality of Watergate before it happened—or about the cover-up after. Of course, we can’t know for sure the details of every conversation Graham had with Nixon, but we do have Graham’s diary, recordings of their phone conversations, and notes from people who were in the room (and on the boat) when they talked.

And there’s no evidence that the pastor to presidents ever talked about Watergate in the way Nathan talked to David, no evidence he ever said something like “You are the man.”

Almost no one did.

Nixon organized worship services in the White House instead of going to a church in the nation’s capital like his predecessors. The ministers who came and preached had the opportunity to say something convicting, to speak up. Instead, again and again, they hesitated.

They would show deference, speak in abstractions, and often indulge in a bit of flattery—after all, they felt flattered themselves to be invited to preach in the White House. They would sometimes draft sermons with tough language but then tone it down.

“How do you talk in a prophetic way,” one Episcopal minister said, “without making it look as if you’re taking advantage of the president in his own home?”

I asked John Huffman that question.

The retired pastor, who stepped down as senior minister of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach, California, in 2009 and from CT’s board of directors in 2015, said misusing the pulpit is a real concern. When you’re preaching to people with power and influence, there is a temptation there that a minister needs to guard against.

“It can be a very selfish act to attack a politician,” Huffman told me. “It can be totally self-aggrandizing. You can’t do that.”

But it can also be tempting, Huffman said, to forget your responsibility and calling: “It’s easy to nod along and not really know what you’re nodding at, except that you’re in the halls of power.”

Huffman said he may have resisted when others didn’t because of his father, John Huffman Sr. The elder Huffman was a minister who became president of Winona Lake School of Theology (now Grace Theological Seminary) in Indiana.

He brought the younger Huffman along as a teenager as he raised funds for the school. Huffman remembers that his father showed no fear as he solicited donations from wealthy industrialists, oilmen, and movie industry moguls. His father was respectful but didn’t bow and scrape.

“My dad said everyone puts their pants on one leg at a time,” Huffman said. “That sounds stupid, but it’s really profound. Every human being is a human being. Every human being is fearful—fearful of being discovered as less than they want to come across.”

Huffman didn’t intend to follow his father into ministry at first. He was interested in politics. He wanted to be like his hero—Richard Nixon.

As a student at Wheaton College, Huffman was president of the Young Republicans, and one of his big accomplishments was bringing Nixon to campus to speak during the 1960 campaign. Huffman remembers thinking he was like Nixon. He had the same instincts, the same work ethic, religious childhood, and hungry ambition.

As he got older, though, Huffman began to worry about the moral hazards of politics. There are so many temptations to compromise. Sam Shoemaker—one of the great preachers of the era—told young Huffman he might do something significant in public service, but he might not. Why gamble? Especially when you knew the eternal value of a life in ministry.

So Huffman chose to become a pastor. He went to Princeton Theological Seminary and got a job assisting Norman Vincent Peale at Marble Collegiate Church in New York City. One of his responsibilities was working the church’s “side door” on Sundays.

“The side door was where the privileged people came in,” Huffman said. “I got to know some celebrity types that way. Peale had a whole retinue of very high-profile businesspeople.”

One of the privileged people that came through that door in the mid-1960s was Nixon, then in his “wilderness years” before running for president a second time. Huffman welcomed him and his family and got to know them, Sunday after Sunday.

Huffman, again, learned the importance of seeing influential people as people, just like everyone else. They had mundane spiritual needs, even if they came through a special entrance.

AP / Charles W. Harrity

President Nixon and his family with John Huffman (right) on Easter Sunday at Key Biscayne Presbyterian Church.

That was a lesson he took with him to his first full-time ministry role at Key Biscayne Presbyterian Church on an island off the coast of Miami. Despite the exotic location, the church was not Huffman’s first choice. His first, second, and third applications for ministry jobs got rejected, though, and the church in Florida wanted him.

He didn’t tell them he couldn’t find Key Biscayne on a map. He accepted the call and moved down to the resort town in 1968.

That summer, Huffman went for a run with his dog Kelly and happened to meet Nixon on the beach. The presidential candidate—in swim trunks, with a towel around his neck—was relaxing with his close friend, a banker named Bebe Rebozo, who lived in Key Biscayne and happened to attend Huffman’s church.

That Sunday, Nixon attended too. It became a regular thing, a few times a year, for Nixon to escape the White House, visit Rebozo, and go to church.

“It was scary and exciting,” Huffman recalled. “I thought I was heading into oblivion. Then the president, my hero from when I was a kid, is in my pew.”

Huffman, at the time, was just 28. He decided not to preach to Nixon specifically. He wouldn’t bring the controversies about the Vietnam War, student protests, or the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency into his sermons. He trusted the president needed to hear the same Good News as the rest of his congregation.

Then Watergate happened.

Nixon tried to hide it—blaming it on underlings, protesting he knew nothing about it—but the cover-up started to unravel. Huffman told Rebozo he was worried about Nixon. He said Nixon wasn’t handling things in a biblical way. He should be honest and confess.

The next time Nixon traveled to Key Biscayne, the banker grabbed Huffman and told him not to say the word Watergate in his sermon. Forbade him from mentioning it.

Huffman didn’t. But he did speak to Nixon privately. “You need to confess,” he told Nixon. “You need to be honest with the American people.”

And Huffman preached that Sunday on Acts 26:26: “The king is familiar with these things, and I can speak freely to him. I am convinced that none of this has escaped his notice, because it was not done in a corner.”

The message was clear. The cover-up was immoral. Huffman didn’t add the words of Nathan, but he might as well have said to the president, “You are the man!”

As I write in my book, that sermon hit Nixon. It sent him into retreat. In that isolation, ultimately, his presidency ended.

To me, Huffman’s choice to speak up seems to be a moment of moral courage. It’s a moment when an evangelical—instead of chasing flattery, instead of getting drunk on proximity to power or caught up in partisanship—spoke the truth with clarity.

Huffman recalls it differently. All these years later, he remembers how he felt about Nixon and how he saw in himself the same weaknesses as Nixon, the same susceptibility to sin. He remembers he said the thing he would have wanted someone to say to him as a faithful friend.

“I really loved the man,” Huffman told me.

It makes me think of all the other ministers who didn’t challenge Nixon when they knew he was like a lost sheep, gone astray. I think of all the other powerful leaders caught up in scandal, from King David to Bill Clinton to Donald Trump, and the ministers around them hoping to catch a little reflection off the light of their celebrity.

What made Huffman different? I think it was love.

Daniel Silliman is CT’s news editor. His book One Lost Soul: Richard Nixon’s Search for Salvation will be released on August 8, on the 50th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation.